This post is part of a technology series called “What?! You’re not using…?” where I’m sharing ten technology sites/apps that I find to be very helpful – and you might too!
I’m a WordPress elitist. A snob. I fully admit that. And I will make a confession. Back in 2002, I was playing around with these things called “blogs” and I signed up with Blogger. It was the one I knew most people had (this was 2002…like, 9 years ago), but I never really did much with it. In 2003, I started Pomomusings (it was located at cleave.blogs.com at the time) on Typepad, and was there for about 4 years before seeing the light and switching to WordPress. So I admit that this post is written by someone who is a WordPress elitist. I look down on people who have blogs that end with .blogspot.com – I’m sorry, but I just do. Once you’ve seen the promised land, nothing else looks as good.
But seriously – WordPress offers WAY more flexibility, and while I’ve seen some good looking Blogger blogs, you have to work a lot harder at it than with WordPress. There are basically two options with WordPress: WordPress.com (read: EASY) or WordPress.org (self-hosted, and takes a bit more know-how). You can be up and running with a WordPress.com blog in under a minute. And there are a lot of really well-designed themes available to choose from with the WordPress.com version.
If you want to play around with uploading stuff to FTPs, web hosting and domain names, and you want some additional flexibility and control over your site, then you’ll want to go with WordPress.org (this is what I use).
And if you want to use an inferior blogging platform (like Blogger or Typepad), I guess you could do that, but…then you wouldn’t be using WordPress, and I’d probably be pretty shocked, and ask you something like, “What!? You’re not using WordPress?“